If you shoot photos with your iPhone and want to maintain ownership of them—or you just want to stamp a custom QR code on an image—iWatermark has solutions.

Photography using Apple's iPhone has been getting more and more serious as the years pass. The company even has an ad campaign highlighting extremely artistic photos shot on its smartphone. And I've heard photo-software executives refer to the practice of "iPhonography," or photography using the iPhone. If you take your photographic work on the device seriously, iWatermark ($1.99) is an iPhone app can help you protect your ownership of your images by using the long-practiced technique of superimposing marks on the image that show its yours. And you can, of course, use it with photos you've shot on other cameras and saved to the phone. It does a decent job of giving you multiple ways to show that photos are yours.

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Starting UpiWatermark is available in free and paid versions. For this review, I tested the $1.99 paid version on an iPhone 6. if you use the free version, every photo you add your watermark to will also have another watermark saying "Watermarked with iWatermark Free, Upgrade to remove this message." The app is a small 13.8MB download that requires iOS 7.1 or later and runs on iPads as well as iPhones. Once the app is installed, you can start using it right away, with no need to create or sign into an account. You simply start by selecting a photo from your cameral roll or by shooting a new photo. The first time, you need to allow privacy access to the features.

Interface I would not call iWatermark's interface slick or modern. It shows very basic button bars at the start. You can select multiple photos in the camera roll at once, after which you're taken back to the same menu you started at, with the change that the third button now says "Watermark 3 Photos," assuming you selected three photos. Tapping this will apply a default seal-like watermark that you probably won't want, so what you need to do now is create your own watermark.

Using iWatermarkTo create your very own watermark that will designate photos yours, you first choose whether you want text or a graphic. The first option is pretty simple, and you could use it just as a text overlay or title feature rather than as a traditional watermark. Font choices are vast, with a good selection of traditional printing, techno, and handwriting fonts available. You also get a choice of bold, italic, and shadow for each. Once you've styled your text, you can easily move it around over the image with your finger.

When starting to create a graphic-based watermark, you have four options: choose an image from your camera roll, paste one you've copied from another app, get a QR code, or scan a signature. The first two are pretty obvious, but there's not much help with the latter two. For example, if you choose QR Code, you're shown an empty box for entering the code. I assume that this means you enter a URL, but that's not clear. It turns out you can enter any text, and someone scanning the code will see that text.

I liked that you can adjust the opacity of a watermark and easily resize and reposition it. But in testing I found that sometimes a graphic watermark included a black border that I couldn't remove. A simple crop tool would be nice.

Social and SharingOnce you've watermarked your image, you can just save it to your camera roll, but you can also email it, copy it to the clipboard, and upload it to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Of course, the message included when you share from the app promotes iWatermark, but fortunately you can edit this to suit your own messaging needs.

No Need for Photoshop For those who feel strongly about their mobile photography ownership rights, iWatermark provides a way to protect your creations. Its interface could be slicker and more intuitive, but it gets the job done, and the QR code generation could be a useful tool if you're looking for a way to encourage contact via your images.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine?s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine?s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine?s S... See Full Bio

iWatermark (for iPhone)

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